Yes, We Really Should Abolish the Senate

The American right has spent much of the last week melting down about the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)’s “Workers Deserve More” platform. Many of the elements of that platform that have predictably provoked the Right’s ire are ones you might expect. The “Workers Deserve More” document calls for bringing the largest corporations under public ownership, for example, and it’s only to be expected that conservative anti-socialists would be scandalized by that.

What might be less predictable is that, in a platform overflowing with ideas that socialists would be expected to like and conservatives would be expected to hate, the particular idea conservatives have picked out for special opprobrium is DSA’s call to abolish the Senate.

When Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara recently appeared on Fox News, for example, he was confronted with what was presented as the extreme radicalism of the proposal. Sunkara’s response was simple: “I’m against the Senate. I think the Senate’s an undemocratic body.”

Many people who are far from radical socialists have noted the same thing and been bothered by it. Even one of the Constitution’s framers, Alexander Hamilton, wrote in the Federalist Papers, “Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York.” Hamilton and his colleague James Madison (who shared Hamilton’s initial opposition) eventually made a pragmatic decision to accept an unrepresentative Senate as part of a compromise to overcome opposition to the new constitution, but their initial instinct was the same one that Sunkara expressed on Fox.

Nevertheless, the GOP and its media allies reacted as if Sunkara and the DSA were advocating the mass execution of puppies. The Republican National Committee’s research social media account blasted out the clip with just the bare description “former DSA Vice Chair Bhaskar Sunkara supports abolishing the Senate” and a quote from Sunkara, apparently feeling that the sentiment is sufficiently self-damning to require no further commentary from them. Others haven’t been as reserved. Writing at the conservative website Townhall , Julia Cassidy describes DSA as “communists” who have “proudly announced their plans to completely abolish the pillars of America, starting with the Senate,” and demands that the democratic socialist movement be “trampled” before this dastardly proposal comes to pass.

The far-right Geller Report went the furthest: “Abolishing the Senate will destroy America as we know it. But that’s the idea. The Democratic Socialists of America need to be designated as an anti-American hate group. DSA candidates being elected to political office is a national security threat.”

Oddly enough, though, few of these commentators seem to feel any need to explain why the Senate is such an important “pillar of America” or how its abolition would “destroy America as we know it.”

Some note that it would be very hard to abolish the Senate, since it would require a constitutional amendment if not a new constitutional convention. But something being very hard to accomplish tells us nothing in itself about whether it would be good or bad if it did come to pass.

And it’s hard to see how abolishing a powerful institution that assigns representatives in such a wildly unrepresentative way wouldn’t add up to a tremendous deepening of American democracy. Indeed, as the Atlantic ’s Jonathan Chait (hardly a friend of DSA in particular or socialists in general) puts it, the Senate’s abolition, “unlikely though it might be, would rank among the great democratic advances in American history.”

The most honest critics of the proposal haven’t tried to argue that abolishing the Senate would somehow make our system less rather than more democratic. Instead, they’ve suggested that making American institutions too “majoritarian” (i.e., democratic) would somehow or other be bad for “the rights of minorities.”

In other contexts, that kind of argument might make sense. Having constitutional protections of freedom of religion, for example, limits democracy insofar as it stops majorities from democratically passing laws to trample the rights of unpopular religious minorities.

In this case, though, it’s hard to make sense of the complaint even in the abstract. If the minority is supposed to be “residents of small states,” the only “right” they’re being deprived of is the right to be disproportionately represented.

And if you know even a little bit about American history, you know that the Senate has often formed a powerful impediment to the protection of actual minority rights. Legislation to end legal segregation and safeguard the voting rights of black Southerners, for example, might have passed decades before the mid-1960s if the Senate hadn’t been such an effective tool in the hands of Southern segregationists. Even laws against lynching, passed in the more democratic House of Representatives, were effectively bottlenecked in the Senate as far back as the 1930s.

More generally, a body that’s less responsive to the will of the voters will be more able to stand in the way of whatever most Americans want, whether that’s to trample the rights of minorities or to expand those rights, and there’s simply no general reason to suppose that minority rights will benefit from that body’s continued existence. Historically, those rights have suffered greatly because of the Senate’s existence.

And today it acts as a great impediment to expanding the rights of the majority. Over half of Democrats in the House, for example, have cosponsored a Medicare for All bill that would provide health insurance to every single American as a right, and put an end to the moral obscenity of medical bankruptcies and workers staying in jobs they hate for fear of losing the health care they and their families need. It’s far harder to imagine Medicare for All passing the Senate, where it’s currently supported by only sixteen of the forty-seven Democratic senators. (All the Republicans in both houses oppose it.)

Some of that disconnect may have to do with the politics of disproportionately represented states, and some with the fact that senators, who only have to run for election every six years, are simply more insulated from the views and complaints of their constituents. They can act, in other words, like aristocrats, deciding what’s good for the commoners whether the commoners like it or not.

Perhaps bringing about such a deep constitutional reform would be so difficult that it’s not worth trying. But if so, that’s a tragedy. And if it really could be abolished, the only thing that would be “destroyed” in the process is a powerful hindrance to real democracy.